“There were hills which garnished their proud heights with stately trees; humble valleys whose base estate seemed comforted with the refreshing of silver rivers; meadows enamelled with all sorts of eye-pleasing flowers; thickets which, being lined with most pleasant shade, were witnessed so too by the cheerful disposition of many well-tuned birds; each pasture stored with sheep feeding with sober security, while the pretty lambs with bleating oratory craved the dams’ comfort; here a shepherd’s boy piping, as though he never should be old; there a young shepherdess knitting, and withal singing, and it seemed that her voice comforted her hands to work, and her hands kept time to her voice-music.” ...
(A charming companion to this first view of Arcadia is where FitzGerald speaks of the home-brewed at Yardley, in the days before “he knew he was to die.”) For a page or two the least learned of us can enjoy the ghostly rustle of these vaporous, eloquent forms that never were alive, yet once gave joy to men who were friends of Shakespeare and Drake; the phantoms of their felicity in gardens and fair women. Then the beauty of visible things, of dress, for example, abounds and is very real, especially Pyrocles’ dress in his Amazon’s disguise—the hair arrayed in “careless care” under a coronet of pearl and gold and feathers, the doublet “of sky-coloured satin, with plates of gold, and, as it were, nailed with precious stones.” The princeliness of the Arcadians’ manners and morals may seem to reflect Sidney’s self “divinely mild, a spirit without spot.” There are thoughts, too, beyond such as the convention demanded, as when Pyrocles says,—
“I am not yet come to that degree of wisdom to think light of the sex of whom I have my life, since if I be anything, which your friendship rather finds than I acknowledge, I was, to come to it, born of a woman, nursed of a woman.... Truly we men, and praisers of men, should remember that if we have such excellences it is reasonable to think them excellent creatures, of whom we are—since a kite never brought forth a good flying hawk.” And some of the situations, conventional enough, only the weary or those that never loved can pass unsaluted; such as Amphialus’ too felicitous courtship of Queen Helen on behalf of his foster-brother, Philoxenos. The conceits, too, do not tower so often, so bravely, so rashly, into the cloudy altitudes without meeting what would not have been found at home: as in Kalander’s hunting,—
“The wood seemed to conspire with them against his own citizens [that is, the stags], dispersing their noise through all his quarters, and even the nymph left to bewail the loss of Narcissus and became a hunter.”
The nymphs themselves, enchanted by the pleasant ways of the pastoral, are sometimes lured out of their fastnesses to bless it with a touch of eternal Nature or of true rusticity, as in the Eclogue in the third book: “The first strawberries he could find, were ever in a clean washed dish sent to Kala; thus posies of the spring flowers were wrapped up in a little green silk, and dedicated to Kala’s breasts; thus sometimes his sweetest cream, sometimes the best cake-bread his mother made, were reserved for Kala’s taste. Neither would he stick to kill a lamb when she would be content to come over the way unto him.”
Delightful, too, is the use of experience when it is said of Pyrocles that his mind was “all this while so fixed upon another devotion, that he no more attentively marked his friend’s discourse than the child that hath leave to play marks the last part of his lesson.”
This has nothing to do with the Plain. We know, indeed, that Sidney wrote it below there at Wilton, in his sister, the Countess of Pembroke’s house. But what has “Arcadia” to do with Wilton, save that it was written there? There, says Aubrey, the Muses appeared to Sidney, and he wrote down their dictates in a book, even though on horseback. “These romancy plaines and boscages did no doubt,” says he, a Wiltshire man, “conduce to the heightening of Sir Philip Sidney’s phansie.” It cannot be said that they did more, that they reflected themselves in the broad, meandering current of the “Arcadia.” At most, perhaps, after heightening the poet’s fancy, they offered no impediments to it. If Salisbury Plain was not Arcadia, it contained the elements of Arcadia and a solitude in which they could be mingled at liberty. Every one must wish for a larger leaven of passages like that one where he compares Pyrocles to the impatient schoolboy, for something to show us what he and the countess said and did at Wilton, and what the Plain was like, three hundred years ago, when the book was being written. Even so it is a better preparation for Salisbury Plain than it would be for Sedgemoor or Land’s End; but I shall not labour the point since I had seen the Plain before I had read the book, and Berwick St. James is as little affected by “Arcadia” as “Arcadia” by Berwick St. James.
As soon as my road was outside Berwick St. James it mounted above the river and was absolutely clear of houses, hedges, and fences for a mile, and showed me nothing more than the bare and the green arable land flowing away on every side in curves like flight, and compact masses of beeches on certain ridges, like manes or combs. At the end of the mile my northward road ran into a westward road from Amesbury, turned sharp along it for a hundred yards or so, and then out of it sharp to the left and north again, thus seeing nothing of the village of Winterbourne Stoke but a group of sycamores and a thatched white mud wall round which it twisted. Out and up the road took me again to the high arable without a hedge, and the music of larks, and the mingling sounds of pewits and sheep-bells. Before me scurried partridges, scarce willing to give up their love-making in the sunlit and sun-warmed dust. Looking over my shoulder I saw two hills striped with corn, and one of them crested with beeches, curve up apart from one another, so as to frame in the angle thus made between them the bare flank of Berwick Down and the outline of Yarnbury Castle ramparts upon the bare ridge of it. Very far northward hung the dark-wooded inland promontory of Martinsell, near Savernake, and in the east the Quarley and Figsbury range, their bony humps just tipped with dark trees.
The next village was five villages in one—Rollestone, Maddington, Shrewton, Orcheston St. George, and Orcheston St. Mary. Here many roads from the high land descended to the river and crossed mine. The cluster of villages begins with orchard and ends in a field where the grass is said to grow twelve feet high. After passing over the Winterbourne and running along under its willows to Shrewton’s little domed dungeon of blackened stone, and an inn that stands sideways to the road, with the sign of a Catherine-wheel, the road again bridges the river from waterside Shrewton to waterside Maddington. But I kept along the Shrewton bank on a by-road. The stream here flows as clear as glass over its tins and crockery, between roadside willows and a white mud wall, and I followed it round past the flint-towered church and the “Plume of Feathers” and its pair of peacock yews. I was looking for Orcheston St. Mary. One sunny February day, when the fields by the road hither from Tilshead were flooded with pools and channels of green, peacock blue, and purple by the Winterbourne, I had seen below me among the loops of the water a tiny low-towered church with roof stained orange, and a white wall curving and long, and a protective group of elms, which was Orcheston St. Mary. I continued along the stream and its banks of parsley and celandine, its troop of willows, beeches, and elms, but found myself at Orcheston St. George. A cottage near the church bore upon its wall these words, out in stone, before Queen Victoria’s time,—